A Mathematician's Apology

G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician … the purest of the pure'. He was also as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword 'unorthodox eccentric radical ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology' written in 1940 offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan his idiosyncrasies and his passion for cricket.